Today I got up, got dressed, and didn’t go to the office.

After a little over a calendar year, I quit my day job at a political think tank in downtown DC. I didn’t leave any richer (and in fact will be closing out the year with my lowest earnings since starting out on my own) but I got exactly what I wanted out of this year—experience working with a development team and renewed confidence that my tech skills are still marketable.

However, this decision didn’t just happen two weeks ago when I gave my two weeks notice. I’ve been preparing to go back to full time freelance for the better part of six months.

Here is everything I did before I felt ready to quit my day job:

Contacted previous employers

While working part time, I scaled back my freelance to a smaller goal—to earn about 50% about what I earned the year previously, the better to not kill myself with overwork. That meant working less for some clients, and not working at all for others.

It’s a lot easier to pitch somebody who has previously given you money than it is to cold call a stranger. So when I knew I wanted to start freelancing again full time, I went back to the people I already knew. One of the most positive outcomes of this was when I let a client know I was looking for more work right away, and it turned out they immediately had a gig right up my alley!

I would recommend this plan of action to beginning freelancers, too: if you don’t have previous clients, try friends, family and professors. You never know which person might know another person who needs a freelancer with your particular skills.

Doubled my freelance work immediately

As a result of getting in touch with all those clients, these past two weeks have been pretty hectic. Just as I started winding things down at my day job to prepare for my exit, I started revving up the freelance engine again. Projects I might have otherwise said no to, because of the day job? They were suddenly on the table.

The entire goal is to have a steady stream of income without a break. Since freelance tends to pay out slower than the two-week regularity of an office job, that meant starting early. It meant taking on full time freelance while still doing part time work. It meant working until 1 AM a couple of nights. But now that that’s over, I don’t have to worry about empty days and an empty wallet while I scramble together a full time income post-day-job.

Saved an emergency fund

No matter how many precautions you take, freelance is still risky. (I’d argue that a regular job, which means putting all your eggs in one basket, is equally risky, but that’s just me.) If you’ve been reading my last few income reports, you know I’ve been padding an emergency fund.

In my opinion, a good emergency fund includes three month’s worth of living expenses. Being totally unemployed for three months is an unfathomably bad scenario, but I want to be prepared. I added up the cost of rent, groceries, my Internet bill, and other expenses for a month, tripled the number, and kept saving until I reached it. Ideally I will never, ever use this money, but wow do I feel a lot safer just knowing that it’s there.

Set up a daily routine

Last year around this time, I didn’t have a great freelance schedule. I slept in and as a result stayed up too late hurrying to complete the work I didn’t finish earlier. I wasn’t on the same schedule as John, who works a 9 to 5, and I didn’t see him as much as I wanted. The truth is, I was severely lacking in self-employed discipline.

I didn’t want this to happen again. So I thought about all the things I liked about my current set-up—getting up and dressed in the morning, walking to the station with John, talking to other humans on a regular basis—and thought about a routine that would let me keep that. I decided that even though I don’t have to go anywhere, I should keep getting up and dressed in the morning anyway, walk to the station with John, and just walk back after that. The brisk walk helped me ease my brain into the work day. From that morning routine, I set up a schedule of things to do until around 6 PM. To ensure I retain my social skills, I’ve got Skype and Slack with other freelancers during the day, and Japanese class and running club in the evenings.

You’d think work-life balance wouldn’t be a problem when you work from home, but tell that to my first-year-freelancing self, who used to sometimes forget to eat. Making a routine and sticking to it will keep me from regressing into lazy misery.

Made a three-month financial goal schedule

Finally, I laid out the next three months on a spreadsheet. I listed out my clients and projects and my projected earnings from each. As the real earnings come in, I put them in a third column and figure out the difference.

This offers some structure to my career. It shows where I thought I’d be at this point, where I really am, and whether I’m exceeding or falling short of what I need to make to pay my bills. If I’m right, awesome, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. If I’m wrong, I have a wake-up call right away that I need to be doing something different and taking on more work. It also shows me how much space I have to work on new business ideas, which won’t pay off immediately, and when I’m better off devoting time to client work, which will pay off much sooner.

I was never a numbers person before I started freelancing, but now I am by necessity. Math still isn’t my favorite thing, but knowing I have numbers to back up my decisions definitely makes me feel a lot better.

Do you have any questions about going from office work to freelance work? I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments.

Every now and then something punctures my personal narrative of being a giant screw-up. This time, it was being invited back to speak at my alma mater, the University of Mary Washington.

Despite my constant rambling about cartoons, I do have some of the hallmarks of a successful alum—the books, the bylines, and generally having my life together enough to send snail mail holiday cards every year. It’s a far cry from who I was in college. I don’t like the person I was back then. I was unhappy with myself, which made me selfish and cruel to people I cared about.  

Still, curiosity and flattery brought me back. I invited John and two of our college friends to come, and we arrived at the brand new campus building that none of us had ever been in, where I would be presenting on an alumni panel. At 29, I was the oldest alum there, from the class of 2009. It’s been 11 years since I moved into my freshman dorm. This was before that dorm had air conditioning! Believe me when I say that my college was founded in 1908 and looked like it for a long time. Now they have technology-forward buildings that remind me of the Apple Store and the dining hall, which used to give me heartburn, now serves quinoa.

The curriculum has also jolted into the future. Before I spoke, we listened to a panel of current UMW students who are taking advantage of a new program at the university called A Domain of One’s Own. Students can have their own dot coms without paying a cent, so the panel was about them showcasing their blogs and portfolio sites. The older students were using while job hunting and building online identities, which I thought was fantastically ahead of the curve. I wonder if having a program like that would have grounded me and helped me think more about my future instead of floundering around sort of depressed.

It’s certainly true today that my online identity is the entire reason I’m able to find work at all, which is also why i was invited to speak on this panel. The moderator sent us all the questions in advance, and being the introvert I am I decided to write them up so I wouldn’t trip over my words when I was on stage. I wanted to share my answers with you because this is exactly the kind of advice I’d love to give to aspiring otaku journalists just starting out.

This is a pretty long post for me, but the TL;DR version is that social media has blurred the line between professional and inappropriate. As a freelancer, every day is an interview while I look for potential new writing and web development gigs. Here’s how I make my extremely geeky online presence an advantage, not a hindrance, while I do that.

1. What is your most prominent digital identity?

Twitter. It started as a hobby, but now I have nearly 6,000 followers. I use it to broadcast my articles, blog posts, and web design projects, along with anything my friends are working on that I’d like to amplify. I recently lost access to my Twitter account due to a technical issue, and the most helpless feeling was knowing that usually if I want to access my audience to let them know I need help/amplification in some way, I tweet them.

a. Is it your website or your social media account ( e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter) why or why not?

In a perfect world, my blog would be my primary online identity, but there’s an extra wrinkle with blogs—you have to tell your audience to meet you halfway. With social media, you are showing up on your audience’s doorstep, where they already are.

1. Do you have different accounts for different audiences/purposes? 

I used to. Ever since I was at UMW, I’ve been interested in Japanese anime to the point where it’s a major part of my identity that influences which jobs I take. When I was less experienced in my field, I tried to maintain a more neutral online presence to keep from scaring off potential employers. Now, I’d rather work for employers who hire me because of my interests. I recently designed a website for a Japanese pop culture company. I have been hired to write about Japanese videogames and comics specifically. So I make sure that’s on my calling card.

2. What decisions did you make when creating or tailoring your personal websites or your different social media accounts?

Control is very important to me online. With social media, you’re in somebody else’s walled garden that can be altered or deleted at any time. So I’ve always paid for hosting and domain names and coded my own websites.

3. Did you have these digital identities as a student at UMW? Or did you begin to create them, or start thinking about creating them while at UMW?

Yes! I was required to have a WordPress site for several of my classes at UMW, so I began getting really familiar with the software back then. My professors encouraged my coding customization, and that’s probably one of the reasons I work as a WordPress developer today.

4. Have you deleted any accounts? If so, which and why?

Never. Since I work as a freelance technology journalist, it’s important for me to first, be reachable in a number of ways and second, be fluent. I am a little old for Snapchat, but I made myself download it and learn to use it because I want to be capable of communicating online no matter which way comes in vogue next. As a developer, I risk obsolescence if I am not constantly learning new technologies and updating my skills. I feel the same way about Internet and computer literacy.

5. Have you had to navigate any delicate situations and if so, would you be willing to share your story?

Where to start? Since I have written a lot about video games and I happen to be a woman, I am a grizzled veteran of getting insulted online. It started with my first online media internship at Kotaku, a former Gawker subsidiary, after I graduated here. I’ve been called fat, ugly, stupid, a hack, a fraud, needs a nose job, people have dug up my former address and other personal information. When I became a journalist who writes online, I gave up my right to privacy.

When this happens, there’s no way to win. You defend yourself by going dark, by refusing to engage, by continuing to produce content as if it doesn’t bother you at all.

To this day, I do not post photos of my friends online. I run an online business with my husband, and we cut off all photos above the neck. I’m also careful not to discuss future plans. I know I endanger myself, at least a little, by making myself visible online and I try very hard to make sure that my decisions don’t negatively impact my family and friends.

6. What role, if any, do you think your digital identity played into your post-undergrad life?

Listen, I wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for Twitter. I was working retail before I got my first web development job—because my future employer liked my blog design. After that I got into online journalism because my editor sent me a tweet asking if I’d like to work for him. I get 75% of my clients through online connections—the rest is through friends of friends.

a. Did you promote them when applying for grad school or jobs?

I’ve always had something digital on my resume. For tech jobs it’s my GitHub profile and for writing jobs it’s my blog and portfolio.

b. Did any of your admissions counselors or employers comment on your online presence?

Absolutely. I feel bad for everyone else named Lauren Orsini because I dominate the Google results. It’s hard to miss, and it always comes up in interviews.

7. What advice would you give current undergraduate students in regards to cultivating a digital identity?

Start general, go niche. Become known for a few specific topics or categories. It takes a long time to get to know a person, so online, you need to become an abbreviation of yourself. Think of your website as your elevator pitch. If somebody can’t figure out what you’re about and why this site exists within five minutes, you’ve already lost them.

a. What must they do?

Have an internet presence outside of Facebook or LinkedIn, which are at the mercy of corporations. Have a personal blog or website you have total control of, and do your best to make it come up as the first result when somebody googles your name and expertise.

b. What shouldn’t they

Remember that people are watching. Don’t have tantrums about your employer on Twitter. Don’t burn bridges. Even in 2016, there are certain things professionals don’t do. Take it from me. I write about cartoons for Forbes, but I still conduct myself like somebody who is constantly interviewing for my next job.

Back in June, I got an email about a potential freelance project. It came from Sam Pinansky, who I knew from his anime translation work and the founding of Anime Sols. This time, Sam wanted to launch a light novel subscription service, and he needed a web designer to help.

You know how the story ends. I took the job, designed the site, and we launched J-Novel Club on Friday night. But I want to tell you about what happened between this weekend and June.

I accepted the job because I agreed with what Sam was trying to do—create a service for anime fans like me. Light novels are young adult novels from Japan that frequently get adapted into anime and video games. In fact, one of J-Novel Club’s launch titles, Occultic;Nine, is also airing as an anime this fall. So even though I don’t read a lot of light novels myself, there’s a ton of overlap here.

Likewise, Sam said he hired me because of my familiarity with the topic. This is yet another reason to include geek stuff on your resume—for many employers, it can be a plus. I know that a major reason I hired Ben Huber to do my Otaku Journalist logo was his familiarity with fandom.

Next, we went over the technical stuff. I didn’t actually do any of the implementation for this project, but it was important for me to know while I was designing. Since Sam used the React JavaScript library to create the majority of the site, and React sorts website behaviors by standalone components, I needed to be able to group my design by components, too.

I worked in Adobe Illustrator, but I couldn’t just freeform the process. I used 960.gs, a grid system for standardizing site design, to make sure that my layout fit into 12 columns that could be rebuilt with code. Here’s three of my mockups; you can see the grid system view activated in the middle. You can tell these are mid-project mockups because they’re using an older logo that we ultimately didn’t use in the top-left position. Also please note that all images and text used here are filler and have nothing to do with possible upcoming releases.

Really, it was all about staying consistent. If I used the light blue color for a button in one place, I needed to use it everywhere else, too, unless I had a very good reason. One of the things I did early on was build a style guide so I’d stop confusing myself.

Every week, usually on Wednesday (since I don’t go into the office that day), I would give my latest layouts to Sam in a shared Dropbox folder. If I had other questions, we’d email, talk on Skype, or in a project-specific Slack community. Sam’s in Tokyo so I thought it’d be tough to get ahold of him, but he pretty much worked around the clock on this project, coding it entirely by himself. I’m still impressed.

I’m really glad to have been part of this project because it’s the first time you can “stream” light novels digitally the same way you can get online anime and manga subscriptions. Previously I only read one light novel series: Vampire Hunter D, but now that I’ve signed up for J-Novel Club, using a sign-up form I designed myself (!!), I’ll definitely be keeping up with light novels more.

Now that J-Novel Club is launched and awesome, my schedule has opened up for new web design projects. I usually don’t only design—I can code and implement too, WordPress especially preferred. If you’re interested in hiring me, contact me and let’s talk!

Top photo by Lee Campbell